To begin, I love my BlackBerry and yes I would consider myself a fanboy of sorts. The BlackBerry was my first connected to the web device going back to my beloved 950 and it's AA-battery. Unlike some device fanboys, I'm secure enough to point out when I believe there is a shortcoming in the feature list.
We're always reading about people's wish lists for the BlackBerry. Some want cooler apps like Angry Birds and others hope for a cross platform BBM client. I'm not going to lie Angry Birds is near the top of my list and if it isn't on the PlayBook I'm calling it DOA; but for my money there is a bigger and more important on my wish list for Santa Claus this year.
I'm a mobile professional as well as a husband & father so to describe my life as busy would be an understatement. The moment my daughter entered grade school I felt like Brooks Hatlen from The Shawshank Redemption "The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry". In order to keep my work life, personal life and my wife's life I utilize multiple calendars.
My BlackBerry is on the BES at work and I have 3 BIS accounts running attached to Google mail accounts. My main Google account has 4 calendars attached to it; my personal calendar, my wife's, my parish group and my beloved Vancouver Canucks' game schedule. Google does a very nice job providing a color coating system of my calendars so I can see what's what at a glance at the desktop level.
I jumped for joy when RIM rolled out the latest BIS update which delivered wireless Google calendar sync. I know my pal Adam Zeis who is a big Google calendar guy agrees the predecessor to BIS calendar was the Google Sync tool provided by the Google Mobile suite was one of the worst products ever delivered to the BlackBerry world. The only saving grace of Google Sync was it allowed for multi-calendar sync and sadly this is missing from BIS calendar sync.
This extra step makes my BlackBerry life quite inefficient; because I'm left cracking open my browser to pull up my Google calendar in order to avoid duplication of my very limited time. Admittedly this is not a huge challenge to my level of nerdness but it is an insurmountable obstacle for my wife. There is no chance in hell she will ever open the browser and launch Google Calendar to see if I've booked something in my calendar before she starts filling up hers.
This calendar challenge does not exist everywhere in the smartphone world; my Android phone does not have this issue so it shows that my dream is totally possible. So when I take the kids to the mall to see Santa, daddy will be asking for true multi calendar sync for my BlackBerry.
So to the people in Waterloo I ask that you please expand the BIS calendar sync to accommodate all calendars listed under "My Calendars' in Google.
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